domingo, 8 de fevereiro de 2015

Drilling for natural gas or fracking has been going on in the United States for sixty years. New techniques called "slick-water, high-pressure, horizontal drilling" introduced in the last decade have made the extraction of natural gas cheaper but at what cost? As this industrial process encroaches on our residential and agricultural areas, negative affects to our environment and health are becoming

evident yet fracking continues to move forward despite any long-term studies on the damage it may cause.

Fracking is a way of drilling into the subsurface and then accessing that material through a series of injections of a high-pressure solution that basically cracks open this rock and allows the gas to then come back up to the surface. On the one hand you have to think about the benefits you get out of tracking. You get cheaper energy and you get jobs, you get energy independence so that we're not held over a barrel by OPEC in the Middle East. All of these things have obvious benefits. Fracking is also considered as a potential "bridge energy" that will transition us perhaps from some other fuels that we're running out of, such as coal and oil.... LINK